This paper describes our work-in-progress toward developing indirect, strategic support for collaborative learners in a web-based scientific inquiry environment. Using the distribution of students’ current problem solving strategies and their most likely predicted future behaviors, we plan to strategically construct collaborative learning groups containing heterogeneous combinations of various ...

Even as community policing has emerged as the dominant paradigm, research indicates that police agencies continue to be highly militaristic and bureaucratic in structure and culture. This article reports findings from an observational study of recruit training at a police academy that had introduced a new curriculum emphasizing community policing and problem solving. The article explores the so...

Several theories of learning have been proposed to account for the acquisition of abstract, generative knowledge including schema theory, analogical learning and implicit learning. However, past research has not compared these three theories directly. In the present studies we instantiated each theory as a learning scenario (i.e., direct instruction, analogy training and implicit training) and ...

We adopt Polya’s heuristics to scaffold problem solving and learning. In particular, in ACTIVEMATH adopting Polya’s framework provides structure (and subgoals) for certain presentation-scenarios and prompts for scaffolding problem solving.

In this contribution recycling networks are used as a starting point for the concept of sustainability networks. Those are complex systems, defined as ‘systems of voluntary but organized cooperation among different stakeholders with the common vision of sustainable development of society within a certain region’. In order to develop and manage such complex systems, creative action will be requi...

Planning for manufacturing workpieces is a complex task that requires the interaction of a domain-speciic reasoner and a generic planning mechanism. In this paper we present an architecture for organizing the case base that is based on the information provided by a generic problem solver. A retrieval procedure is then presented that uses the information provided by the domain-speciic reasoner i...

Probably, most of the students who have taken (or will take) undergraduate courses based on the so-called exact sciences have faced (or will face at some point) the terror of being unable to solve some of the proposed problems or exercises, despite having a good theoretical knowledge of the topic. Basically, you may know the equations, you may understand the mathematical passages, you may have ...

Research has shown that worked-examples play an important role in learning and problem solving and are crucial to cognitive skill acquisition. We propose to extend previous work on example-based learning systems with regard to the instructional design of the examples themselves. This can be done by drawing on current developments in Cognitive Load Theory. We aim to explore the roles that worked...

This paper reports the work carried out on modelling diagnostic problem solving, based on empirical studies, in three example domains i.e. medical problem solving, physics problem solving and road accident analysis. Results which emerge from examining this modelling activity, for a similar task across different domains, relate to contextual features, re-usability of reasoning processes and mode...